1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to interactive data processing systems and more particularly to a system for allowing users to determine the amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) being used by a single process or the amount of RAM being used by the operating system and all processes running in the system.
2. Description of Related Art
To improve the quality and efficiency of computer programs, several types of memory usage tools have been developed. For example the THESEUS program in the Operating System/2, version 1.2 (Operating System/2 and OS/2 are trademarks of the IBM Corporation) system computed the RAM used by all processes in the system. However, it did not allow the computation of the RAM used by only one process of interest. It computed the RAM used for all processes, displaying all of the usage information for the processes, leaving it up to the user to determine the process of interest and its related information. Further, because it was necessary to analyze all of the memory allocations of all the processes in the system, this analysis could take up to a full minute to complete. The previous memory usage programs used a scan of all physical memory in the system, determining the memory usage for all processes and the operating system.
When doing analysis of memory usage in an OS/2 system, it is often necessary to know the memory that one particular process in the system is using. Further it would be extremely valuable to be able to do the analysis of memory usage by a process quickly (in realtime). Additionally, it would be desirable, and may be necessary, to determine the exact purpose of several memory objects that make up the memory usage for that process. This information can then be used to determine if a process is efficiently using the system memory.